For this assignment, Id like you to write a document for a choice of audience either public or professional for the purpose of informing that audience about your literature review topic. You will have the choice of writing either a public-facing explainer article or a memo to your colleagues in a professional setting.
Either of these will center around a single social justice issue associated with your topic. Some of our readings have dealt with the bias in and politics of designing and using technologies, data, and classification systems. To get you thinking further, some more examples of tech and justice issues might be:
gender/race gaps in representation
workplace monitoring and surveillance, including algorithmic management
search engine, information access, and database biases
machine learning biases, including biases of model training
interface biases (e.g., colorblindness, gender categories)
infrastructure access
Ive also appended some broader domains in tech in which justice issues play a large role, in case they happen to be related to your topic.
You will identify one issue of your choice that is related to your literature review topic. Depending on your topic, this may require you to do a bit more research than you have so far in order to do justice (pun intended) to the particular issues about which youd like to inform your reader. (This assignment will serve you best if you pick something in concert with your Project 2 topic. If you are really having trouble finding something related or decide you no longer like your topic, please feel free to pick a new one; however, please also understand that this will require you to get familiar with a totally new topic in not very much time! If you email me, I can also help you with your brainstorming.)
Genre Options
You have two choices for this assignment. You will not be required to explicitly tell your actual reader (me) any information about your audience, but it should be clear to me what values your implied reader (your audience) holds based on the rhetorical choices you make more on that below under each option.
Length: 600-800 words
Public Audience: Explainer
Explainer articles take a small piece of a bigger social issue that readers may not understand and break it down. The focus of an explainer is on what people need to know about the topic, rather than on proposing solutions (that would be more appropriate, say, in an opinion piece).
Professional/Co-op Audience: Memo
This type of Memo is addressed to colleagues and informs them on an issue related to their work. It also provides tightly-scoped analysis and/or recommendations for how those colleagues might interpret and potentially address the issue in the specific work they are doing, or tend to do.
Assignment Requirements
In either case, I will be looking for:
A clearly indicated choice of audience, either by an indicated choice of publication (in the case of the explainer article) or in the To: field (of the memo)
Explainer: Even though youre writing for a public audience, remember that there is really no such thing as the general public (even the broadest kinds of public writing, like newspapers, seem to be written for groups that share certain values or beliefs). Who are you aiming for? What is their age range and cultural background? What kinds of literacies do they have? What magazine or newspaper would you hope to publish it in?
Memo: While an internal memo informs a fairly tight professional audience on a specific situation or topic related to their work, remember that in our hyper-networked world, an ostensibly private memo is to some degree potentially public. How will that knowledge affect how you compose your memo?
You to generate interest in your topic for that audience.
Explainer: Unlike with academic articles, which scholars are likely to read if it contributes something new, your explainer article is unlikely to be read and not passed over unless you attract their attention. Youll need to make your problem relevant, explaining or implying why the reader should care. Consider how the provided examples do this. Some may use a human-interest dimension, a narrative, or some well-chosen and contextualized statistics. Because these pieces are short, this happens very quickly!
Memo: Your memo should start by making clear some issue, either within your chosen work environment or more broadly in the field/industry. Otherwise, your reader will not know how it applies to them, and would probably read right past the email or throw it away. Again, this happens very quickly at the beginning.
your adoption of the formal conventions of the genre
Explainer: Consider the features that the model articles and documents use. What patterns emerge? Headlines? Bylines? Teaser lines? Subheadings? Use of hyperlinks?
Memo: Please include To:, From:, Subject:, and Date: fields.
Appropriate style for your choice of genre. Please use an appropriate level of jargon for your audience, based on their degree of expertise in your topic. Please also consider syntax here: do you want long and tangled sentences, or short and concise ones? Signaling clauses like contrastive connectors, code glosses, counters or reformulation markers? What degree of hedging or boosting?
Attribution of sources in style appropriate for your choice of genre.
Explainer: It is very, very unlikely that an explainer will have a works cited section. Some may provide a list of further readings on the topic. Some longer explainer documents use footnotes, but yours need not.
Memo: A memo generally does not use footnotes, endnotes, further readings, or a bibliography.
Instead of formal citation, use in-text strategies, like signal phrases (e.g., “According to…”) to bring in your supporting material.
If you happen to use an image from elsewhere, please be sure to provide the source in a caption underneath the image.
I will also upload the literature review as reference, the literature review is about soccer shoes and its affects on players performance, linking it to civil engineering
